In Praise

An Original Poem by Jon B. Stobbart

We undertake a pilgrimage

To a transcriber of the heart,

Mile upon mile drags then speeds by.

We stand in a possible world

Where Henchard and Tess were born,

Where woodlands are wealth and true strength.

And between an avenue of trees

And a late conservatory,

Her narrow life, her shade of sorrow,

Between the view across the garden

And four walls that are still humming,

A thousand poems of love that’s lost,

A syntax torn apart by tomorrows,

A powdered plume of long-legged moths:

In this place, at a time, in space.

And little did I know, busy at days,

That though poetry is the praise of life,

Its pilgrimage is the making of us:

Our steps, the humming in that room,

Walking the avenue of trees, - these

Are great things made against our loss.

© J.B. Stobbart - September 2020

• Associated pages
• Visiting the Sick Tree at St. Pancras Old Church Cemetery
• 'Great Things' and 'The Oxen'
• Desperate Remedies
• A Laodicean - Part of the Novels of Ingenuity Trilogy
• The Withered Arm
• The Heaths of Hardy
• Best and Worst Poems of Thomas Hardy
• Tess (No Angel Wings)
• The Darkling Heart
• Great Things
• The Hand of Ethelberta - A New Play
• The Lepidopterist's Tragedy
• The Destruction of My England
• Henchard's Last Will and Testament
• The Gabriel Oak Tree
• The Three Wayfarers (Opera)
• Settings for Baritone and Piano by John Whittaker
• Hardy Perennials by Brenda Sharp
• Neutral Tones: Song Settings of the Poetry of Thomas Hardy
• Penpethy Souls
• A History of English Poesy
• The Coppice Gate
• Where the Picnic Was with a Musical Accompaniment by Gary Cunliffe
• In Praise
• Thomas Hardy Songs
• 'Bathsheba' by Izzy Rees
• The Three Strangers
• 'Interlopers at the Knap'
• 'What the Shepherd Saw'
• 'The Superstitious Man'
• Thomas Hardy's The Hand of Ethelberta
• Thomas Hardy Poems to Music

Tess, a feminist vision of Thomas Hardy's classic novel

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